Negotiations to get Minecraft's Steve into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate may have been ongoing for "at least" five years.
Mojang co-founder Daniel Kaplan revealed the news on Twitter. Kaplan first asked his followers to guess when discussions started about the character coming to Nintendo's Smash Bros, which prompted many teasing replies.
Eventually, he confirmed in a reply that talks started "at least five" years ago. In a follow-up, Kaplan added that he has "no idea when implementation started," most likely due to the fact he left Mojang in 2017 to work at Coffee Stain Publishing.
If you missed the news, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate director Masahiro Sakurai revealed on Thursday that the game's next DLC characters will be Minecraft's Steve, Alex, Zombie, and Enderman. An in-depth look at how these characters will work in-game is coming on October 3, where a release date for the characters will also be revealed. Twitter suffered a brief outage when the news dropped, which we're sure is just a coincidence...
A blog post on the official Minecraft website offers some more details on the deal. The game's chief creative officer Jens 'Jeb' Bergensten commented that getting Minecraft characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate "is the result of an amazing collaboration with Nintendo." "As fans of the series and avid players at our studios, we couldn’t be more excited to see Minecraft join Smash’s already legendary lineup of characters.”